AT&T To Increase Bills By $5 Per Month

[GhostShip]

In a strangely timed but obvious move to increase revenues AT&T have announced a suprise for many customers, an increase in costs.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-sat_attfeb02,0,4011693,print.story

Most customers with AT&T's high-speed DSL Internet service will be charged an additional $5 a month, the company said Friday.
The announcement suggests that popularity of video and music downloads as well as photo sharing and online gaming are behind the increase.
"Our prices are still in line with the market and much lower than our cable TV competitors," said Roskopf. She added that AT&T recently extended free use of its wireless broadband hot spots to all of its DSL customers, adding to the value of their service.

In December AT&T hiked the price of its dial-up Internet connections by $6 for existing customers, raising it to about $16 a month. It also set a price of nearly $23 a month for new dial-up customers. At that time the company suggested it was trying to nudge dial-up customers to embrace DSL.

The announced price hike didn't sit well with some observers.
Routers, modems and other equipment used to deliver bandwidth are dropping in cost as rapidly as bandwidth demands are rising, said Dave Burstein, who operates DSLprime.com, an industry newsletter. "Total cost to the company for the bandwidth it delivers is about $1 a month per customer," Burstein said. "AT&T is raising its rates because it can. It has the market power to do so. Increased costs aren't the reason."

The United States is falling behind other developed countries in deployment of high-speed Internet because telephone companies and cable-TV operators have market power to charge more and deliver less than is true in countries such as Japan, Korea and France, said David Kolata, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board.

The evil side of me thinks AT&T are merely laying on an extra tax in expectation of a masive fine for allowing the NSA to illegally intercept the web traffic of US citizens on US soil, of course you wont hear that from anyone who would be able to state authoritatively on record the cause of the increase.

[]-[êll.Ôñ.ËÀR'][']-[.]

Charge more because of increased music and video downloads as well as photo sharing and online gaming whilst throttling people so they cant do it at the speeds they signed up for........... kinda sounds like most isp to me lol

[MinersLantern]

Isn't it funny how a failing business always decides to save itself by jacking the price, and therefore accelerating it's own demise? lol

[]-[êll.Ôñ.ËÀR'][']-[.]

Problem is in some vast areas of the usa people have no alternative as a lot of these companys are the only option avalable to them .... meaning they can do as they please up to a point and people have to like it or lump it...... the sooner there is more competition for all the better for the consumer.